Bono is particularly fond of parentheses in these song titles, and this only adds to the sense of an artist struggling for false profundity. California (There Is No End To Love) even begins with the sound of church bells. We get The ‘Miracle’ (Of Joey Ramone) (whose unmediated directness was so far from what U2 have produced here) and we get the cod-mysticism of Song For Someone. Everything, be it human relationships or early experiences with music, is bathed in a sacred, perhaps even messianic aura. Whilst it doesn’t contain anything quite as cringeworthy as Get On Your Boots, it continues Bono’s cloying journey through trite platitudes and pseudo-spiritualism. Songs Of Innocence (its title hinting not only at William Blake’s poems but also David Axelrod’s near namesake masterpiece from 1968 – has Bono even heard it?) is a neutered, soporific album. Achtung Baby and Zooropa were flawed, but they at least presented a band keen to experiment and provoke (The Fly, by way of contrast with the aforementioned, still sounds like one of the strangest and most imaginative Number 1 hit singles of the ’90s). Bono and The Edge wrote a superb song for Roy Orbison’s comeback album (She’s A Mystery To Me). They had distinctive qualities to their sound (not least The Edge’s strafing guitar sound and Larry Mullen Jr’s propulsive drumming) and whilst they have always had a tendency for earnestness, they at least once matched that with searing music, memorable melodies and palpable conviction. This is in spite of some truly lazy writing that has veered from the crassly manipulative (Beautiful Day, Vertigo) to the benign and bland (Stuck In A Moment) via the unfathomably ludicrous (Get On Your Boots and Elevation – two of the worst mainstream rock songs in living memory). were hurt badly by negative writing despite some excellent records (and even Around The Sun is streets ahead of U2’s post-2000 output), U2 are still too often presented as retaining some artistic merit behind their corporate face. This week, it has suddenly become popular for the press to give the band a good kicking – but it could be a challenge to find a truly critical review of their more recent albums in a broadsheet or mainstream music magazine. It is here that U2 have been so systematically indulged for much of the last 15 years. It is hard to see other politically active superstars ( Bruce Springsteen, R.E.M.) doing this. Of course, the faults of this deal will be felt much more keenly due to Bono’s unyielding sanctimony on socio-political matters and his vast personal wealth (not least as to whether this serves to further devalue creative currency for bands with less reach and freedom).
U2 songs of innocence professional#
Yet I inevitably write this using a Macbook Pro, and everyone makes compromises to a greater or lesser degree in service of their personal and professional lives. It would be very easy to turn a review of this record into a discussion of whether bedding up with the major player in a heavily distorted digital music market is a sensible strategy, especially given all that has been unearthed about Apple’s employment practices.
U2 songs of innocence free#
You will probably also be aware that whilst it arrives ‘free’ for the consumer (whether they want it or not), it certainly has not come free for Apple. You will know that it has been forcibly dropped into the iCloud accounts of millions of users of Apple’s iTunes software. Unless you’ve been living in a hermetically sealed cave for the last week or so, you will of course already know everything about the new U2 album.
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